Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Full Circle

T.S. Eliot in the conclusion of the Four Quartets: after an endless consummated journey one knows one’s origins for the first time, as part of a circumambulated totality:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time

This circular wholeness should be the very essence, or fabric, of existence: “a condition of complete simplicity”. Life as a circle of consumed fire, costing no less than every­thing...until one arrives, in the exploration, at a point or another on the lines of the circle…and then finally, the circle is sealed tight and curvaceously closed...all the discrete fragments-dots and endless dispersed pixels consolidated into a continuous curve, the circle of life circled…

Charmed by the sirens of life, we invariably think there is something more than the dark rocks were are heading t00000000000000

Saturday, November 26, 2005

Our Great Physicians of the Infinite...

« Oui, Deleuze aura été notre grand physicien, il aura contemplé pour nous le feu des étoiles, sondé le chaos, pris mesure de la vie inorganique, immergé nos maigres trajectoires dans l'immensité du virtuel » (Alain Badiou)

The cosmic fire of the stars...

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And A Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an Hour"

(William Blake Augeries of Innocence)

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

A Library of Imprisoned Souls – Ocular Sphinxes

I have always liked libraries (cemeteries of dead life, of all that life could be) and spend most of my time in them. Not so much for reading (god forbid,s!) but rather, for the encounter, and hopefully the capture, of the dreamy female gazes that populate such enclosed hexagrams: ocular butterflies flirting amidst the hushed and rustling density of textual absorption…

Libraries are deeply erotic places, text, eyes and bodies mingle in a silent frenzy, which has driven many to lose their bookish reasons…out of studious oblivion a flash of ocular desire is awaken: eyes that disturb the peace, that disrupt the textual silence…fevered summits of ocular fervent sunders the neutral sphere… for an suspended instant, bodily form and textual content reach their zero point of fusion, amidst the rustling of papers…the sinuous resemblances of what is written or read is, for a while, disavowed…

The gaze spills over the edge of text and book, into the eyes of the other, in a suspended frame, text and desire momentary lapse into each other. Dreamy contemplations, that dream the person across the distant rows as the ideal soul that, maybe, will light up the darkness...Without spoken acknowledgement and amidst the reading of same author or subject, there is a play of fevered lubricity, often approaching delirium…yes, libraries and their bookish labyrinths, have never been places for studious sublimation or disinterested objectivity…

The true patron of all libraries has always been De Sade (a textual existence par excellence). And let us not forget Bataille, Borges and Foucault. All three thinkers considered libraries places of infinity, and hence, of the imaginary: simulacrums which disrupt the universal ideal and power claims of logical knowledge. A strange paradox indeed…The library has always been the infinite transgression of the ideal of universal knowledge, not its foundation or preservation. The conditions of bookish abundance, of textual profusion, is an accursed share, an infinity within, that perpetually disrupts, the closures and finitudes of universal knowledge. It is not surprising that throughout history it is the libraries that one burns down first, before all else…the destruction of text and the rape of bodies go hand in hand…violence as metaphysics…

Libraries, cemeteries, museums…all belong to the same dream series, somber repositories of what has never been and will never be…frozen dreams for a pristine dawn that has, and will, never come…the owl of Minerva, has never flown, neither in dawn or dusk…

Thursday, November 10, 2005

Notes from Underground

I've seen things...seen things you little people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion bright as magnesium... I rode on the back decks of a blinker and watched c-beams glitter in the dark…all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain...” (Blade Runner)

Is life a sarcastic smile in a deadpan universe?

The human is a tight-rope over an abyss between finitude and infinitude: all humans are inebriated by life-death forces beyond them - a human life made out of two directional forces, which move in opposite directions: time and matter. As such, man is torn apart like a sphinx answering his own questions - an infinity loop caught within the impossibility of an ascendance or descendance. No doubt, this is one of the reasons that the world so uncannily shimmers, a dream caught within another dream, ad infinitum…as if existence/life was not quite there as it should be…life’s horizon always falls away, whether in distance or nearness…

Consciousness, subjectivities and desires are embodied infinities, and yet, they are encased by finitudes or limits - social and natural - which sunder everything to an infinite potential that will never be individually fulfilled. What could be possibly more insane, tantalizing and Sisyphus like, than this earthly life we all fall into, for a while…Stringless Puppets waved around in the crystal sea of time…in which every cosmic wave and minutely drop is another world translucently foreclosing other worlds.. 0of which we will never see, feel or conceive...How could we possibly not be haunted by these “je ne sais quois” these “almost nothings”, as Vladimir Jankélévitch would say, these unknowables, ungraspables and untouchables, twinning and spiraling below the surface of our ego days and somber nights…

Thursday, November 03, 2005

The Thirst for the Infinite - Hopperian Beauty

"When you are in bed and you hear the barking of the dogs in the countryside, hide beneath your blanket but do not deride what they do: they have an insatiable thirst for the infinite, as you, and I, and all other pale, long-faced human beings do. I will even allow you to stand in front of your window to contemplate this spectacle, which is quite edifying....Like those dogs, I fell the need for the infinite. I cannot, cannot satisfy this need. I am the son of a man and a woman, from what I have been told. This astonishes me...I believed I was something more" (Isidore Ducasse Lautremont, Les chants de Maldoror).

Don’t we all believe the same?...

In a 1982 essay entitled "What I Believe", Ballard spelled out some of the obsessions that inspire his work: "I believe, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the ele­gance of graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels." These dispirited landscapes of Hopperian Beauty, haunt us all…

One could add to the complex of Hopperian beauty, (Edward Hopper, the genius painter of desolate lit landscapes) the following: echoing warehouses of overgrown emptiness, hollow factories of corroded iron, motorways of speeding light, the solitude of glazed looks across the dark night of neon lights, venetian blinds criscrossing the illuminated lines of a solitary night, and above all, the white reflections of pale naked flesh in exhausted motel rooms...